TGS: Gun Loco Preview

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Speed and gunplay for your psychotic pleasure.

By Ryan Clements

When you're scouring the halls of TGS, there are a lot of games you'd expect out of the Japanese trade show. Role-playing games, dating sims and effeminate heroes with buckle orgies on their arms are all standard fare. A game like Gun Loco, on the other hand, is a little more surprising. A third-person shooter that combines the thrills of free running with good, ol' fashioned violence, Gun Loco is very fast and makes for a great multiplayer experience. I played Gun Loco for the first time at publisher Square Enix's booth and, surprisingly, I totally dominated the competition. My team still lost, but still -- I was at the top of our under performing group!

Gun Loco is actually based on a line of figurines by Kenny Wong. This makes for an interesting aesthetic, as all the characters have angular models and exaggerated features. These characters are inmates on a prison planet and the objective in the single-player campaign is to build up a following on this depressing, isolated rock and fight your way off.

Unfortunately, Square Enix wasn't showing off single-player at its booth, so I, of course, stuck to the multiplayer modes. This mode pits two teams of six against each other to see who can rack up the highest jail sentence (by killing things). This sentence is dictated by your kill/death ratio which is calculated at the end of the match.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before the madness gets underway, each player selects a character. These psychotic criminals each have a specific weapon assigned to them, as well as a special move. This gives players something to consider beyond the standard color palette selection. One character, for example, can dive and shoot simultaneously, while another unleashes a single powerful shot right out of a sprint.

You'll be doing a lot of sprinting in Gun Loco, actually. Holding down the left bumper/trigger will cause your character to enter a mad dash, which limits your side-to-side movement but dramatically boosts your speed. Your view of the action also changes, as it enters a roadie run view reminiscent of Gears of War.

From a sprint, you can you execute a close range, one-hit kill with the push of a button, but it's not as easy as it sounds. Opposing players can unload all sorts of unholy hell on you as you sprint towards them, and players that both attempt a melee execution will enter a grappling mini-game to see who lives.

Part of the charm in Gun Loco is the way the game feels when sprinting, and observing how the character moves through the environment mid-sprint. If you hit a barrier during your run, the character will automatically vault over it without pause. Similarly, a sprinting character will roll off a corner, rebound off a wall and slide under a gap without a single button command from the player. This keeps the player free to analyze enemy movements and react accordingly. If Gun Loco is about anything (besides the running and gunning), it's about deciding how to act based on the location and speed of the dude you're about to blast open with a rifle.

The online matches I played all went down on the same map -- a grungy outdoor number with plenty of barricades and metal crates to work with. I spent most of my time using the sprint to get to advantageous positions or hunt down unsuspecting members of the opposite team for a one-hit kill. It's incredibly satisfying to land that finishing blow after having sprinted across the entire level with your enemy looking off in another direction. In fact, I might go so far as to say that the free-running is the best part of Gun Loco. It's just like breathlessly sneaking up behind someone in Halo to nab a stealth melee. The payoff is priceless.

Even though I decimated the opposing team and scored some serious points, my teammates were not so lucky. We ended up losing the match despite my sincere efforts, but I was still satisfied with the experience. Gun Loco is fun, though my limited exposure to the game means that there's still a lot more to learn, for better or worse.

Gun Loco is set on the farthest reaches of the solar system, where the most insane criminals are sent to live on a prison planet. No walls, no rules, little hope for survival. There, inmates across different climate zones and maps must fight for survival.